Cochon Butcher drew crowds almost as soon as it started selling bacon-collard melts and house-cured andouille as a casual spin-off of Cochon in New Orleans five and a half years ago. Next year, the owners of the widely imitated sandwich and butcher shop hope to repeat that success in a town with no shortage of hit-makers: Nashville.

Donald Link, Butcher's co-founder and owner, said he expects the new restaurant to open in Nashville's Germantown neighborhood in the spring of 2015. And its opening will mark more than Link's first attempt to operate a restaurant outside Louisiana.

This corner in the Germantown neighborhood of Nashville is the rumored location of a version of Donald Link's New Orleans restaurant Butcher. The area is a culinary hot spot in the city and the location is just a few doors down from the accalimed City House. (Brian Kozak Photo)

Several years ago, Pihakis and Link started experimenting with breeding heritage pigs and raising them sustainably. They were inspired in part by a desire to provide their businesses with quality meats. If successful, they also hoped to influence pork industry practices by demonstrating that their progressive approach to raising heritage hogs could generate profit. The partnership eventually led to the opening of a USDA-approved meat processing plant in Eva, Alabama, called the Fatback Pig Project.

"The idea we started years ago when Nick and I started breeding pigs, it's working," Link explained. "We didn't want to open another Butcher unless we could provide our own meat. And now we can."

He added, "Butcher in New Orleans is buying 500 pounds every week from our slaughter house. And that is still just a fraction of what we do."

A larger portion of the Fatback meat processing effort is going towards a growing wholesale business for Cochon Butcher-branded packaged meats. Link said Halperns' and Inland Seafood, two national food distributors, received their first shipments of Butcher-branded bacon, ham, Cajun sausages and other cured meats last week. "Sometime in the fall we should have a retail package line out for Whole Foods and places like that," he said.

Cochon Butcher.

Link also hopes the union between his company and Fresh Hospitality will ensure the success of Cochon Butcher restaurant's expansion to Nashville and, ideally, points beyond. Cochon Lafayette, his company's first attempt to open a restaurant outside New Orleans, closed in 2013, just over a year after opening.

"The idea (in Nashville) is we didn't want to get into a situation like we were in in Lafayette," Link said. He suggested one of that property's problems was that it was too dependent on personnel from New Orleans. "We've turned down offers to open (Cochon Butchers) in Atlanta, Las Vegas, even San Francisco," Link explained. "No one we work with wants to move."

Link said the difference in Nashville is that Fresh Hospitality will provide the manpower to run the restaurant after the New Orleans based staff gets the location up and running.

"Nick will provide the systems and manpower for us to operate," Link said. "They have trained restaurant managers and chefs who are looking for promotions in the form of new businesses. The guy who is going to run Nashville is in New Orleans training right now. We're trying to build this thing in a different way."